Peru and the United States, 1960-1975

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Walter suggests, Peru obtained a salience in US policy beyond its significance as a middle- rank Latin American country. At the same time, Peruvian politicians came to believe that successive US administrations were singling out the country for treatment that harmed its long- term interests. What lay behind this period of turmoil? Initially, problems arose following the 1962 Peruvian presidential election, when a military coup stopped the US- backed Aprista candidate, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, from taking power, but the difficulties lay deeper. The tax concessions enjoyed by the International Petroleum Company (IPC), a subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, were long a sore point for Peruvian nationalists. In addition, Peru claimed a 200- mile fishing limit (agreed to with Ecuador and Chile in 1947) that inflamed Californian fishermen, and in 1967 the country decided to purchase Mirage fighters from France, challenging the US monopoly on military assistance and arms sales in the region. Then, after the military overthrew President Fernando Belaúnde Terry in October 1968, US interests faced a wave of expropriations, beginning with IPC’s oilfields. Equally troubling to the United States were both the military government’s rapprochement with eastern European countries and Cuba, and the possibility of an arms race with Chile following its purchases of helicopters and tanks from the Soviet Union. Peru must have seemed to the United States like an unruly kid that needed discipline.Walter considers these issues through the diplomatic correspondence from both countries, a significant innovation in a topic often marked by a unilateral approach dependent on US national archives. He supplements this with interviews, most importantly with Celso Pastor de la Torre, Belaúnde’s ambassador in Washington, and General Edgardo Mercado Jarrín, whom President Juan Velasco Alvarado appointed as foreign minister in 1968, as well as media sources on both sides, including Caretas and Oiga, the two main Peruvian newsweeklies. However, Walter’s concentration on the ambassadors, explicit in the book’s title, leads often to a chronological narrative of the kind that British diplomatic historians refer to disdainfully as “what one Foreign Office clerk wrote to another,” even if, in this case, the conversation is between ambassadors and their principals.Walter argues that US policy was largely determined by the private interests of IPC, which fought expropriation throughout the 1960s and insisted on adequate compensation. Californian fishing interests also placed pressure on representatives in Congress over the claimed 200- mile limit. Arms purchases annoyed liberal Democrats. The State Department and White House had little confidence in either Belaúnde or Velasco. There is little to suggest that the US government ever undertook an objective evaluation of IPC’s claims or even understood Peruvian resentment over the special treatment awarded to the company by the disgraced regime of President Augusto B. Leguía in 1922. Instead, the United States curtailed both military and economic assistance to Peru for long periods, often blaming delays on unspecified bureaucratic problems, while also vetoing support for Peru from the Inter- American Development Bank and the World Bank, a policy that Secretary of State William Rogers neatly termed “non- overt economic pressures” (p. 225).There is little with which to quarrel in Walter’s interpretation, but it leaves several questions unanswered. Although those of us who lived in Peru during the Velasco period have the knowledge necessary to appreciate the context, other readers may not. Walter does not provide any background on the IPC dispute (and gets the date of IPC’s entry to Peru incorrect), he does not identify IPC as a subsidiary of Jersey Standard until well into the narrative (p. 56), and he does not offer an initial profile of US business interests in Peru, with the result that companies like W. R. Grace, Cerro de Pasco, Marcona, Southern Peru Copper Corporation, auto manufacturers, and fish meal firms appear out of the blue when they are first mentioned. One is left to wonder why Washington supported the interests of Jersey Standard so unquestioningly when the unresolved dispute was clearly damaging other US business interests: was it because of connections between Jersey Standard and politicians in Washington or, more broadly, to deter expropriations by nationalist governments elsewhere? Did the US ambassador in Lima or State Department officials never come under pressure from other businessmen with investments in Peru? Walter does comment (p. 183) that the US business community in Lima was relieved when the Nixon administration decided in 1969 not to apply the Hickenlooper Amendment to Peru, but otherwise we get little idea of the US ambassadors’ business networks or indeed the embassy’s association with what we might now call soft power organizations like the Peruvian- North American Cultural Institute or the “American” school and churches in Lima. Nor do we learn details about “the strong ties the United States . . . established in the 1960s and 1970s with the Aprista Party” (p. 311). By concentrating on the particular disputes and the ambassadors who interpreted them to their principals, Walter takes an important step toward appreciating the complexities of US- Peruvian relations in this period, but it will require the use of other sources — the papers of other government departments, corporate archives, and the archives of the relevant international financial institutions and organizations like the American Chamber of Commerce and the Ford Foundation (neither mentioned here) — for us to advance further in our understanding

Economic history · Economics · Foreign policy · Government (linguistics) · Latin Americans · Monopoly · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · History · International Relations in Latin America · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

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